How to monitor critical configuration changes

Problem statement

Maintaining a strong security posture requires continuous monitoring for potential threats. Critical configuration changes across your IT infrastructure, including security tools, firewalls, servers, and cloud platforms, are significant indicators of potential malicious activity targeting initial access, defense evasion, and persistence techniques. Detecting these changes promptly is crucial for effective threat mitigation.

Attackers may manipulate system configurations to weaken defenses or establish persistent access. Real-time monitoring of these modifications provides an early opportunity to identify and respond to such threats.

Scenario

An attacker compromises a user account with elevated privileges and modifies firewall rules to open a backdoor, alters registry permissions to suppress alerts, and reconfigures router settings to redirect traffic. These actions allow continued access and data exfiltration while evading detection mechanisms.

Detection challenges include:

• Changes spread across multiple devices and platforms, making correlation difficult.
• Legitimate administrative changes can mask malicious activity.
• Attackers may modify logging or alerting settings to avoid triggering alarms.
• High volume of daily configuration changes creates noise, complicating identification of suspicious behavior.

This complexity makes proactive monitoring and intelligent alerting, like that offered by Log360, critical to catching such stealthy attacks early.

Relevant MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques:

Tactics: TA0001 - Initial Access, TA0003 - Persistence, TA0005 - Defense Evasion

Techniques: T1562 - Impair Defenses, T1059 - Command and Scripting Interpreter, T1070 - Indicator Removal on Host, T1021 - Remote Services

Solution:

Log360 provides end-to-end visibility into critical configuration changes across your environment. The solution comes with prebuilt alert rules and reports tailored to detect risky modifications and help correlate them with user activity for deeper investigation.

Here’s how Log360 helps monitor configuration changes:

• Firewall configuration changes: Detects rule additions, deletions, or modifications that might expose unauthorized access points.
• Windows registry changes: Tracks registry key creation/modification attempts, including failed attempts and permission changes.
• Router and network device configuration changes: Captures and categorizes changes by source, including from remote devices, across major vendors like Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto.
• Cloud platform changes: Monitors AWS and Azure configuration changes including security group, ACL, IAM, and VPC alterations.
• Server configuration changes: Observes changes to IIS, MS SQL, and other critical servers to catch misconfigurations or unauthorized changes.
• System process modifications: Uses correlation rules aligned with MITRE ATT&CK to flag changes to essential services and system behavior.

For deeper threat validation, security analysts can use Log360’s Incident Workbench to trace changes back to specific users, view post-change activities, and assess if the behavior is part of a larger attack sequence.

Prerequisites

• Ensure syslog forwarding is enabled for firewalls and network devices
• Enable audit logging on Windows servers and cloud platforms
• Add data sources like AWS, Azure, Windows, and firewall devices in Log360

Next steps

• Customize smart threshold alerts for sensitive configuration areas
• Correlate configuration changes with UEBA for better threat context
• Set up automated incident response actions in case of high-risk changes

Why Log360?

Log360 brings together SIEM, UEBA, cloud security, and compliance under one roof. With preconfigured alerts, customizable correlation rules, and deep forensic capabilities, it helps your SOC team detect and respond to unauthorized configuration changes before they escalate into major breaches.